How to Deal With ‘Coronabrain’
A daily exercise to calm your anxious, distracted, and overwhelmed mind
Your brain is like a dog. It can be trained. Most people just don’t know how.
Imagine a poorly trained dog. Whenever you take it for a walk, it pulls on its leash and barks at people. You haven’t established yourself as its leader, so it’s fearful and aggressive. You have no idea what it’s going to do next.
Now imagine a well-trained dog. It knows you’re in charge and follows your lead. It still acts like a dog — it sniffs around, greets other dogs, occasionally pulls on the leash — but these actions are manageable. You have strategies to calm the dog and help it feel safe.
With the threat of the coronavirus, we’re feeling anxiety, distraction, and overwhelm. All day, we read the news, become anxious, get distracted from what we’re doing, check Twitter, worry about the future, read the news again, and repeat. I call this “Coronabrain,” and it’s like living with a poorly trained dog. It’s exhausting to exist this way, especially when we don’t know when things will get better.
To ease Coronabrain and regain a sense of control, you need to train your mind. There’s an exercise I learned from my mentor, psychologist, and master coach Maria Nemeth…
